CVOM Extensions in SAP Design Studio 1.4

[Former Member]

It is truly exciting to see all the new features and enhancements in SAP Design Studio 1.4! One interesting feature is the compatibility with SAP Lumira CVOM extensions. To add an extension in SAP Lumira, all you need to do is add the ‘bundles’ and the ‘features’ folders of the CVOM extension, into the ‘extensions’ folder. In SAP Design Studio, you will have to create a package of these two folders.

These are the steps I followed, to install a CVOM extension for a Polar Clock (extended from D3).

STEP 1: Open SAP Design Studio 1.4 and under the ‘Tools’ menu select ‘Install CVOM Chart Extensions’.

STEP 2: You will be prompted to enter the location of the zip file of the component.

After installation, I restarted the application, but couldn’t find the installed component. Usually, when a SAP Design Studio extension is installed, the installed component is displayed either in the custom components category or a separate category as specified in the component, but for this CVOM Extension, there was neither any separate category such as CVOM Extensions nor was the component displayed in the custom components category.

I even tried searching for the installed component, using the new component search feature introduced in SAP Design Studio 1.4, but couldn’t find it. After spending a lot of time and trying out various things, I found it under ‘Additional Charts’ (only after assigning a data source) along with the in-built additional charts such as Heat/Tree Maps, Trellis etc.

SAP Design Studio 1.4 also requires you to assign one or more dimensions and measures to the X axis and the Y axis (even if the installed extension does not use a data source).

On clicking Apply and OK, the installed component will be displayed in the workspace Outline.

In Additional Properties, you will find options to change the basic properties such as the padding, background color and title. Unlike in SAP Design Studio extensions, this additional property sheet is auto generated by SAP Design Studio for CVOM extensions and does not require any additional effort or code for the html page to be generated.

Now that the same CVOM chart visualizations can be shared between SAP Design Studio and SAP Lumira, there are many aspects to be explored, such as customizing the additional property sheet for CVOM add-ons, data population etc.

The image below shows the same CVOM extension being used in SAP Lumira.

With a basic set of properties and no scripting capabilities, it is not clear how these CVOM extensions would help build effective and versatile applications in SAP Design Studio. I guess, we may still have to depend on the native SAP Design Studio SDK to enhance charts with advanced customizations.

Source: http://visualbi.com/blogs/design-studio/cvom-extensions-sap-design-studio-1-4/